The Best Medicine: Allison Dopazo '19

Academically, Allison does it all: she’s a Chemistry major with a supplementary major in Gender Studies and a minor in Sustainability. When she’s not busy studying for one of her many disciplines, Allison is dancing with Project Fresh, serving the Gender Relations Center as a FIRE Starter, or representing her dorm on the Student Union Board.

Climate change piqued Allison’s interest when she was just a little kid. Her favorite movie was Al Gore’s famous An Inconvenient Truth, garnering roughly, by her estimates, a thousand views when she was only nine years old. She came to Notre Dame to pursue a pre-med track, with Chemistry as her declared major due to its shared application in both medicine and climate change. She intends on attending medical school after graduating, with the ultimate goal of practicing as a medical doctor who can easily explain the science of the treatments to her patients. Although this career path doesn't directly relate to her environmental passions, she does intend on continuing her advocacy for the fight against climate change and the importance of STEM education for young children.

Though she has yet to decide upon a final capstone project, Allison is looking into incorporating her Gender Studies background into the enterprise and is interested in further exploring climate change or STEM education. She’s also recently joined a civil & environmental engineering lab that focuses on how nuclear weapons affect the environment over long periods of time.